Loveless Chapter 3 Muddying The Waters
by Commander-Inky
Summary: Rikan works hard for Vincent. But it is only to fill the gasping ache of his own lonliness. Rejected and angry, he viciously plots the downfall of his Commander.


III 

_Muddying the Waters_

A fountain pen. The style supplement. Rifle parts. Flat champagne.

Things arranged on sticky mahogany, to be picked over delicately, critically, to be pressed like a cool kiss against a cooler cheek, in cigarette giddiness, in unpleasant, concussive layers of unsteadiness and corporate lust.

Heart stopping, heart breaking. Vincent was elegant introversion, chair turned away from his desk to face the best view in the house; grey sunlight and the idle flaying of acacia trees, the dripping, dirty wet mist that coiled in stagnation, in stillness. Brutally handsome, disinterested features were reflected back as he studied the impassive white mask of his own ghostly, leering self.

The summer had been remorseless in its heat; searing itself onto the memory; Damp, boneless handshakes, lingering into wrongfulness. Rikan was pretty in a glossy, blank sort of way. Sweat streaked shirts, and long, unhealthily desirous glances stirring juicier, breathier passions. The sweet uncleanness of sliding, deliberate, touches, an ache on skin. Kisses that were ruination on the lips, murderousness in tones of lascivious red, wiped on pinstripe sleeves. Greasy, sleazy, firm groping in the dark, baroque corridors. In the sticky shared bedroom they had watched each other undress with a carnal stare, shivering breaths, swallowing hard on sickly lust. Savage, selfish, firm, raw, the first time was like discipline, bodies thrown and held down, tasted, savoured and used.

The summer; a heavy, rutting, sucking heat that had smeared itself over the mansion like a contagion. His underling was glossily handsome and languid in the sunshine.

A slap of rain on the high window, the shifting of indigo and white, and Rikan's taste was lacing the air. His faded pallor was a portrait of grey, electrified sanity, a watery, uncertain vision, on the glass. Vincent turned, his slippery laugh short and horrid, listless with dull, meandering indifference.

"Hello, you little _bastard_."

A sneer flitted over Rikan's white lips, before he smiled, an arrogant, conceited, switchblade grin, fingers twitching. He placed a cup of coffee on the style pages and folded his arms, eyes ringed with glorious bruise hues, dreamful purples and exquisite blues. "There. Dripping with charm today, aren't you?"

"As ever, Rikan. So, have you taken your tranquilisers?" There was a casual, gently luring cruelty to his breathy, public school tones; some small, gloating triumph.

Glancing at the champagne, he uttered, "...Bit early to be _drunk_, isn't it, Vincent?" Rikan's vicious lust was insistent and voyeuristic. He swaggered to his own desk, vertebrae clicking, young joints cracking, painfully symphonic. Slumping into creaking leather, Rikan noticed the violent, shuddering tremble of his own wet palms, skin prickling. He gripped the edge of the dark wood until his cold knuckles were blanched, a line of sweat trickling over his clenched jaw.

"Steroids for breakfast again, I assume? You're looking very pale."

"That isn't any of your business, Vincent."

He smiled, raw-boned savagery, smugness on his idle, drawling, heartless tones. "You look ill."

"I was sick this morning." Rikan murmured, over guilty, selfish lips. He hooked tenderly curling strands of greasy, snarled hair behind his ears, staring down onto the nightmarish, jealous scrawl over his reports. "I've been awake since _Thursday _doing your paperwork." There was a flat, unspoken vileness on his tongue. "It's very unfair that -"

"Change the subject, Rikan." Vincent's voice was suddenly dreadful, joyless, clotted with a sneering superiority. His kohl-painted stare settled enviously on Rikan, eyes like rosy stains of heady, dizzying wine, spoiling.

"_Fine._" He smirked. Jugulated covetousness and a tumbling hysteria were layers of arsenic on the grinding pitch of his raw laugh. "Can I just suggest something to you, as your lieutenant, and as your _friend_? Scrub the _fucking_ stink of alcohol off yourself before your appointment with the Professor."

His features flickered, panicked. "What? You _are_ joking."

Lazing, luxuriating in his arrogance, Rikan sneered a reply through his teeth. "The Professor wants to see you, Vincent. This morning."

Vincent slumped back into leather comfort numbly, the half-finished bottle of cheap champagne on his desk seeming tragic, hellish, a mockery. "Why? Why does it have to me? Every _single_ time." Accusatorily, sullen aggression rising. "Didn't you tell him I was busy?"

"I told him."

Sulkily, dismally, Vincent reached for his coffee. "And what did he say?"

"He said that he knows you do nothing all day, except get drunk and play the piano."

Dourly he placed the cup down. "I'm under a _lot_ of pressure Rikan."

The shivered tones of his underling, "But...I think the general consensus is that you... abuse the privilege of the piano."

"Can't I even relax occasionally?" Drowsily, he stared at Rikan, turning slowly ashen, dusky loathing painted on his dark lips, a hot blush of rage over fine cheeks. "Professor _fucking _Hojo. Unbelievable. My life...is just this fucking _disaster_. "

"Please, please try to be pleasant."

Their minutes passed in a blankness of silence and muted, vengeful glances. Conversation was an ordeal; niceties poisoned by dislike and yearning, each other's name bitterness, a layer of grease and denial, on the tongue. Vincent rehearsed derisive remarks in his head until they were carefully polished, reserving the best for his Lieutenant, little cruelties to comfort himself in their evil repetition. He stood, swaying as he walked to Rikan. He watched the young man, pale as lace, work.

"You should go to bed Rikan," He breathed, leaning over him, possessive hands tightening at his willowy shoulders. "If you're going to be miserable."

He stared insipidly at his fountain pen's slant, speaking blandly. "Whose bed? Whose bed should I go to, Sir? Yours? Because you're bored?" He turned to rest a cool, creamy analysis on the Commander. "You think you can just...slip between the covers with your little Lieutenant and it means _nothing_?" He clasped his head in ashy hands, a latticework of dull blue veins on his temples, gazing hollowly, narcissistically, at his reflection in the burnish of mahogany. Emptily, "You don't know how much I...I..."

A sly war was waged between them. He was darkly charming. "Shh...You're a perquisite of the job, that's all." Vincent smiled heartlessly, tasting the mellow-floral cologne that laced the air. His hand lightly touched, rubbed, Rikan's throat, squeezed his thin collarbone, sighing at the slenderness, the sinfulness. "That's always been the way in our department. You have the pick of your underlings, and good boys... Good boys don't tell the Company about it."

Rikan nodded slowly, slavishly, with Vincent draping himself possessively over the high shoulders of his obedient lover, body leaden with violence and jealousy. He was hollowly delighted with the compliance, his tolerant stillness. Close enough to whisper, to breathe in the scent of warm hair, of clean shaven skin, his full lips slid over the fair boy's ear, tonguing, uttering in gasps his cruel lusting. "Take off your shirt, Rikan."

Casually, the lieutenant laughed, the sound of bloodless fingernails shrieking upon a blackboard. "Well, I'd _like _to do that, but _someone_, let's not mention names _Vincent, _didn't make sure my last progress review was _shining _like a_ thousand suns._"

Vincent shoved him back, recoiling at his awful, machine gun laughter, the blush of coral hues upon his pretty, stitched face. "Those... are confidential." Rikan's abrupt sniggering persisted, until Vincent's fists clenched at his lapels. "_Shut _up. You tell me _now_ who gave you permission to read my reports!"

"...Read them? I had to _fucking_ rewrite them." His dread smile, pulling back wintry lips from gleaming teeth, fell. He slid the Commander's hands away with disgust, straightening to smooth the creases from his chalk-stripe suit. "You can't run _crying_ to the corporation, just because occasionally we might argue, and you might _think_ that you hate me for a few minutes. Do you actually _want _people to laugh at you?"

His dark red lips quivered in quiet, unfilled fury, ruby eyes at once angry and despairing and intent on his icy darling. His tones were spoilt and clipped. "No. I don't want that at all."

"Well, you know what they say, Vinny."

"What would that be?"

"...Good boys don't tell the company about it."

"Good morning Mr. Worsens." Hojo stood lingeringly in the doorway, starkly white, looking first with eyes of mire green to Rikan, directing slow, sludgy apathy towards the modish, sickly Lieutenant. Cheerlessly, he glanced at Vincent, with a distasteful, leering, forced smile, and, as a spiteful afterthought, added, "_Valentine_."

Relentless in his ambition, Rikan arose, wiping the dank sweat from his palms before offering the professor a yielding, pliant handshake. Cloyingly, he spoke, grasping Hojo's palm with wet, avaricious fingers. "_Hi_, how are you?"

Listlessly, the professor returned the yearning handshake, swallowing disgust at murderous white hands; squirming, throttling, a strangler's grip. He perused the obsessive, immaculate order of Rikan's desk; the slavering ambition in creamy blue eyes, the monstrous dead smile of the curling pink scar and the stitches in the young man's face. Nervously, feeling the judder to the Lieutenant's hand, he replied. "Fine. Thank you. How are you? Have you... taken your tablets this morning?"

"Is that a joke?" Psychosis flickered in the dull milk blue of his butcher's eyes. He turned to the betrayed, resentful glare of his Commander, meeting with a dreadful, vile silence. Hesitantly he laughed, uncertain, loosing Hojo's fingers and sitting leadenly, dejectedly, plastic, mechanised charm failing. "...I can't remember, probably. Wait, I must have done," He grinned. "There's a pill under my tongue."

Awkwardly, "How was your... holiday on the coast? Did you enjoy yourself?"

With a note of treason in his conceited tones, Rikan spoke. "Oh. Is that where _he_ told you I was?"

Vincent stared away guiltily, shamefully, gently biting the luscious red of his glossed, full lip.

Rikan's slithering, conspiratorial silver tongue lulled. "Well, no, I didn't enjoy myself _too much,_ because as a matter of fact I was having correctional..."

"It rained the entire time he was there." Vincent laughed gaspingly, desperately. "Didn't it?"

Rikan stared at him fitfully, anaemia pallor, grey blond. Quietly, "...Therapy."

"Didn't it Rikan?" Vincent repeated softly, ashamedly.

"I...forgot there was even such a thing as a blue sky," The monotonous grind of his terrible hysteric laugh echoed around the heavy stillness, enduring toxically into the silence. "...Where Vincent recommended I be sent." His grievous, awful saccharine smiling was a memory of the sluggard ingraining of blank ideologies into the flesh of a weak mind. It was a promise of antibiotics, of translucent normalcy, of characterless civility, of immaculacy veiling chaos.

"I _said_ I was _sorry_." Vincent tried. "Would anybody like...some champagne?"

"Are you asking, or would you just like permission to drink?" Hojo's dissecting stare settled on him with a vacant revulsion. "I have business with you, Commander."

"_Well_, have you been through the correct channels?"

"This is personal."

"Speak to Rikan."

"I did, to make an appointment with _you_." Hojo's voice quavered with impatience.

"Sorry. But I'm very busy. I'll pencil you in for tomorrow." Gloatingly, he sipped his coffee, cruel, malign glee hidden behind the cup, gazing out of the window into the greyness of the morning.

Anger rose throatily in his tones. "_How_... can you possibly be busy when you don't do a thing?"

"_Excuse_ me?" Vincent flicked his fringe from the lustre of burgundy eyes. Snappishly, "Let me tell you a little story, Professor."

"I don't have time for this!"

"Just listen. Once upon a time, there was this eagle that lived in a...forest, of some sort. The eagle sat in his tree all day, watching, waiting, whilst all the little forest creatures busied themselves on the ground. One day, a little rabbit, oh, I don't know, we'll call him _Hojo, _noticed the eagle in his treetop perch, still, motionless, without a care in the world, and decided to copy him. Except within a few minutes of staying still on the ground, along came a fox. And the fox ate the rabbit. Now, can you tell me what the moral of the story is?"

"I'm going to report you _Valentine._"

"No, wrong I'm afraid. The moral of the story is, to do _nothing_ all day, you have to be _very, very_ high up. Now leave me alone."

Mutinously, voice glutted with spite and a peculiar lust, Hojo uttered, "Your superiors _will _be informed."

"Please, try. I'll just say that you've been harassing me sexually," Vincent smiled dirtily, slurring corruption and distortion with malign delight. "Which is partly true."

"How...dare you..." He moved to leer over the desk, slamming folders down, snarling hatefully. There was a flicker of disconcertment, of white panic, in Vincent's expression, as Hojo leaned to whisper viciousness and malice to him intimately; green eyes meshes of unrelenting revulsion. "How dare you even _suggest_ it."

Cowardly, he panted, "It's my word ...and Rikan's... against yours."

The Professor glanced at the lazing, decadent boy, chicken-scratching an indolent scrawl over his paperwork. "Then you'll lie for him, will you?"

With an air of possession, "Rikan agrees with _me_. I have him very well-trained."

Guiltily, looking up, Rikan answered. "...It is a serious...accusation...Sir..." Breathlessly he faltered into spinelessness under the intimidation of the Commander's stare, words lagging in the intoxication of Valentine's authority. Numbly passive, eager to please, he forced tones of obedience, guttural with yearning. "But...but a rather unimaginative one. I'm sure we can come up with something a little more _scandalising_ than sexual harassment. I'm thinking... Massive embezzlement of company funds."

"Well... _I'm_ thinking... We kill you, and make it look like suicide." A seamy, glutted smirk flitted over his boyish lips, and deliberately slow, he pulled his body from the suck of leather, to stand leeringly in the full condescension of his height. "Well," He hissed, tone rich with pleasure, "What do you say to that?"

With measured, cold rationality, Hojo spoke. "Psychologically speaking, young men show loneliness, sadness and confusion through aggression."

Both were breathless, hot rage blushes over high cheekbones, raw loathing in flawless features. Vincent was possessed of an easy, businesslike awfulness, and Hojo a grey courage, snarling, with vivisectionist fingers that trembled and smeared black, lustful touches. Each dared the other voicelessly, gaspingly.

"Well, Vincent? You hear that? Are you lonely, sad and confused? Because I _fucking_ _think_ you are. I don't suppose you even _considered_ that might affect my chances at promotion. Either of you. You sicken me." Rikan hissed, an insistent, languorous sneer over his pallor and a taint of savageness and supremacy on his tongue. "My Father," He began, gloatingly. "My _Father_..."

"Went insane?" Vincent's terrible wrath was suddenly focused on Rikan. Darkly, "Well, he did, didn't he?"

There was a long drag of silence. "No."

"And your Brother. He went mad too. Didn't he try to drown you?" A ghastly, interrogator's smile was on his face. Rain whipped against the window, quietness swathing them. Rikan did not reply, only with tortured eyes the colour of a louring sky, of an ashen gloaming, stared vapid devastation at Vincent.

Smugly, he turned to Hojo. "It's happening to him as well."

A vacuous, lingering stillness. "I see." Stoically the Professor studied Rikan.

"_Nothing_ is happening to me." He rose, dehumanised, swaying lethargically, sweat a watery gleam over his tight, luring musculature. With a subtle paranoia, an undertone of franticness, "I want to be dismissed."

"Family history of it, isn't there? Tell the Professor, Rikan." Jealous lips, eyes mute with hunger, "Then we'll see how much he really wants to be your _friend._"

The fair boy seemed to slump brokenly, leaning on his desk, fingers curling like meat-hooks, clenching into white, shuddering fists, dank, butter-cream blond hair slipping over his dull, milky stare, watching his own vague veneer reflection. His voice was thickened vileness, with tears a knot in his pale throat, the winding scar was a tragic, misplaced grin. "Dismiss me _please_."

"Why? Can't cry in public? Answer the question." Vincent's taunting was predatory, low, something that blunted his unhappiness and affirmed his self-admiring, lazing command. A studied composure slid down Rikan's expression, neutralising his wrenched emotion, until an icing-sugar smile, touched with rabid hysteria, settled on his face. Casually, standing straight and still, every panic throttled down within him, he turned to Hojo. "...I suppose congenital madness has always been something of a...glass ceiling for me, career-wise." He gasped as he spoke. "Obviously _someone_ thinks its clever to read my medical records...Inherited madness. Manic depression, schizophrenia. Psychosis. It means that I... I have the predisposition,"

"Must be all the inbreeding." Murmured Vincent.

"...The predisposition in the blood and nothing more. _But,_ for your information, _Vincent,_ my brother was perfectly sane when he tried to drown me. It was also the first time he put his_ tongue_ in my mouth. But I don't suppose my records mention that, do they? Tarquin always told me I was a good boy," He gazed vacantly, a ghastly, flawless indifference over his cold features, an abyss in the murkiness of his dull, hypnosis gaze. "Always said he loved me. Excuse me." A false, flick-knife slim smile, as he walked dazedly from the room, from the swathes of scent, of thick cologne and pink champagne, eyes burning with tears. "Thanks for the chat. Oh, and...Sir?"

Sated, Vincent's voice was no longer metal upon metal, but the richness of greed upon subtle disgust. "What is it?"

"Love you." Thin, ignoble, glorious, Rikan glanced back, set against the ochre of the hall, skin the endless white of clouded pearls, grin ravening, deathly. He slammed the door, laugh dim, splintering.

For each second that Hojo stared at him, Vincent felt his heartbeat shudder in his throat, fists gradually clenching, a tender blush rising on his cheeks. He drew matches and a cigarette case from his blazer, teeth gritted. He was almost crying.

"Why is he back here, Valentine?"

"I ...ordered him back."

There was a terrible clarity to Hojo's sour voice. "I need to speak to you. About the project, we... we _must_ have specimens. I came to ask you..."

"Why are you talking to me? Not my department, is it?" Vincent tucked a cigarette between his full lips, pouting, miserable and aggrieved.

"We need..." He rubbed his forehead, easing a knitted brow, soothing the deep scowl creases over his youthful face. "We must have human subjects."

His tones were thickening arrogance. "Well _I'm_ certainly not volunteering."

"Not volunteers."

"What then?"

"There are plenty of people in the village..."

"_Slow_ down," Vincent flicked his lighter, his features the semblance of warmth for a moment, a lustrous flame guttering soundlessly in the mirror of his eyes. He smoked leeringly, expression disdainful, smile of slow, hissing mockery. Leaning forward, licking his teeth, with an air of secrecy, "Do you understand what you are suggesting? What you are _implying_, my friend, is that my job does _not _deal _specifically_ with Administrative Research."

"I know enough about the _Turks _to realise you aren't here as our guards," Curling his lip, Hojo gathered his files from the desk. "And definitely not as our assistants."

"Is that some sort of _accusation_?"

"You're here to make sure nobody _runs_. To keep us _quiet _and under control."

The Commander slammed a hand down over Hojo's papers, before calculatingly, purposefully, grinding out his cigarette on them, sneering idly as dirty ash crunched and smouldered over delicate ink-pen diagrams. He shunted the files laughingly at the scientist, then, scarlet eyes a horrendous promise, tainted with rage and veiled dread. "Well," With a dark, knowing smirk, "There's only one way you might test that theory, _sweetheart_, and that would be to try and leave. Do it, by all means; I won't try to stop you. No, Hojo, I am not a man that enjoys hunting another down like a _dog_." He lifted two rifle parts with elegant, pianist's fingers and snapped them together tenderly, threateningly, with a clack, an action rehearsed into instinct. "But for you, _for_ _you_, an exception I will make. Now _get out_."

Hojo backed away, fixing a hot, hateful stare on the man, his steps punctuated by the dim, slow cracking of a gun being traitorously locked together; the thickened air laced with machine oil and clawed loathing. He opened the door with his heel, glaring at Valentine until the Turk glanced away, biting his lip, panicked by the silence. "Ignorance, Vincent, _pure_ ignorance. That's what you are. Goodbye."

He closed the dark wooden door, clasping a hand to his aching head. Hojo's eyes were bloodshot with tiredness and strained in the sunlight, skin blanched with stress and with months in the dank, dripping basement. It had aged him prematurely, cheekbones raw and jutting, youthful lips pale and dry, tender fingertips calloused with the clutching of a scalpel.

Rikan was waiting for him upon the staircase. A vanity mirror was in his palm, neck thrown back to glut himself on the lethargic contemplation of his own flawlessness, interrupted by the thick pink scar stripe of his threaded together cheek, a memory of Vincent's knife. He sang detachedly, in sullen notes quiet with resentment. "_Young hearts beat free...tonight...time is on... _your side."

Hojo stared at him emptily.

Rikan placed the mirror down. "Ever consider that this might be hell?"

"_Every_ day." He swallowed painfully.

Offering his business card, the lieutenant smiled. "Things would be different if I was in charge."


End file.
